>>Sarcasm aside, I had actually forgotten that was even how that one >>went. How terrifying. >>Huh, really? I had just assumed that changing Gryphon's return to his >home timeline to another accident was to deliberately avoid some of >the weird problems that Grand Theft Starship plus the very odd conceit >that literally Gryphon's entire crew weren't leaving behind any >family, friends, or life goals in order to accompany him caused.

Oh, I probably knew it when I wrote Manhunt. Hell, I probably re-read Secrets preparatory to writing Manhunt (I know I excerpted some of HN1's dialogue straight out of it). I mean I'd forgotten it since then. That was, after all, nine years ago.

>>You would think he'd at least have >>bought it in that scenario. I mean, if they were scrapping it >>anyway. >>I don't think Gryphon was actually rich in the other universe; he went >into Starfleet basically immediately after arriving and acclimating >and I'm not sure that they pay their officers well enough to afford >even a decommissioned Connie no matter how frugal they are. Maybe he >made some sound investments, tho. :)

He wasn't, but for something like that, he'd have found the money someplace. There are a lot of couch cushions in the Beta Quadrant.

>Then for >a few years they moved to this idea that the Federation was actually >this sort of quasi-hippie vaguely transhuman spiritual space utopia >and the people we saw in Starfleet were actually social freaks because >they retained the capacity to do things like make war on other >sentient beings and use violence to defend themselves without >imploding emotionally at the horror of it all.

Oh man, I remember that now that you've said it. That was in the Motion Picture novelization, wasn't it? I remember thinking, the first time I read that, that it was the weirdest damn book when it got to talking about that stuff. Like the part where Kirk notes that a lot of people think he and his colleagues are weirdbeard retros for still having surnames.

>DS9, in my opinion, managed to strike the best balance between "the >Federation has tried to move to a post-currency post-scarcity economy" >and "some things are still scarce, and the Federation is surrounded >by, and does business with, polities that have NOT moved to a >post-scarcity economy."

They kind of flirt with that the way they handle the in-game currency in STO. I mean, there's latinum and all the rest, but most of the low-level transactions are handled in either dilithium (unit unspecified, probably a standardized exchange mass?) or "energy credits", which I guess represents how much you're authorized to use the replicators. Which makes sense, since if you think about it, even the stuff that comes out of replicators isn't "free" in the utopian postmodernism sense. The energy that got converted into that matter had to come from somewhere, and there has to have been infrastructure and work invested in harnessing it. Thermodynamics doesn't care about people's ideals. :)

(And then there's the whole question of how the IP for the stuff that's being replicated is handled, which never comes up in any Star Trek property I can think of offhand. I suppose if you were a sufficiently idealized future engineer you'd work for free.)

>That job must be so immensely fraught. I remember that TNG episode >where some of their dudes get busted on a world that is right on the >cusp of warp. Great episode.

I don't remember that one, but there was an episode of Enterprise with a roughly similar premise. It... well, it didn't suck, which is more than you can say for a lot of the first season, really. :)